'Enjoy Poverty'

From Panos London's Illuminating Voices, this article describes the ethical questions posed by artist Renzo Martens in his film about photojournalists and international aid agencies and some of the controversy resulting from the screening of his film entitled "Enjoy Poverty". In it, Martens contrasts the poverty in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) with the earning power of the media who are there to capture it in photographs. Martens is a Dutch artist who uses his film to protest against the exclusion of the Congolese people from making money from what he characterises as a resource that belongs to them: poverty.

Martens presents the argument that aid agencies and journalists generate photographs of Africa for their own financial benefit but do not make any real changes in local communities. He contends that non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are not motivated by the goal of making structural changes that will have an effect on economic poverty.

Questions have arisen about the film's premise that poverty is a resource being exploited. Some have questioned why the filmmaker did not intervene in the situations he was criticising in a way that would alleviate the suffering of those he filmed. Martens responded that he did not go to the DRC to change things or give people false hope. "I let the politics that decides reality decide this film."

Adrian Evans, the director of London-based Panos Pictures, which holds a global archive of up to 500,000 images, states that Panos Pictures aims to document issues which are under-represented, misrepresented, or ignored. Most photographers represented in the archive are not from Africa, according to Evans, because the African photojournalists he knows tend to work for international news agencies, whereas Panos Pictures hires freelancers. He argues that photography commodifies everything, not exclusively poverty or the developing world, and that many photographers do in fact voluntarily send money back to economically poor communities. He also suggests that photographers indigenous to the location being photographed would not particularly act differently or choose different subjects.

Medecins Sans Frontieres Photo Projects Manager, Bruno Decock, acknowledges that it is possible for aid agencies to exploit images of poverty, but photographers can avoid reinforcing stereotypes, use a sense of dignity in representing people, and stick to telling the story before them. On the subject of ownership of the photos, he states, "Copyright laws give ownership to the photographer, but I think people portrayed are also entitled to ownership." Glen Tarman, the advocacy manager for BOND, an umbrella organisation for international development NGOs, points out that it is possible for communities to benefit from the communication possibilities of images taken in their communities: "...it could also be that the communication will have a powerful effect in creating change. The judgement call is would you rather tell a story without the images, or would you tell the story with the images though imperfect?"

However, Martens sees the structures of colonial exploitation "where European countries controlled African resources and exploited them for their own ends remain today. Now, he argues, multinationals, NGOs and journalists continue to perpetuate the same ‘distorted reality’ in which those who own the resource - in this case poverty - are excluded from exploiting it for their own benefit."